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Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

Lauren Gawne, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne

SUMMARY

It has now become something of a cliche to say that the study of gesture has come a long way in the last couple of decades - but this volume shows just how far the field has come. The study of gesture as a phenomenon has been the focus of much work, but as ''Integrating Gestures'' shows so well, the study of gesture has implications for a wider range of fields, including conversation analysis, child language acquisition, cognitive linguistics and semantics, than just the study of gesture in and of itself. The volume contains wide ranging work from scholars across a range of gesture-studies methodologies and this is one of its major strengths. The volume contains twenty-six papers divided into six thematic parts, covering a diverse range of fields including the study of the functions of gestures (Part One), first language development (Part Two), second language use (Part Three), classroom interaction (Part Four), discourse and interaction (Part Five) and music and dance (Part Six). In this volume the observations of gestural action has helped further our understanding, not only of the nature of human gesture but also of its relationship with the wider linguistic system.

Part One, 'Nature and functions of gestures,' is comprised of seven papers. It starts with an introduction by Mika Ishino and Gale Stam, the two co-editors, who give a brief overview of the academic study of gesture and their definition of gesture, as well asa typology of gesture and a summary of the papers in this volume. In Chapter Two, 'Addressing the problems of intentionality and granularity in non-human primate gesture,' Erica A. Cartmil and Richard W. Byrn use an intentionality-focused model to assess the communicative use of gesture by captive orangutans, identifying 64 distinct gestures with 29 of those having specific predictable meanings. In the third chapter, 'Birth of a Morph,' David McNeill and Claudia Sowa examine narratives where the verbal channel is suppressed and how this differs from the use of co-speech gestures in narratives. They find that gestures in the absence of speech emerge as morphs, with standards of good form and syntagmatic values, while co-speech gestures do not. In Chapter 4, 'Dyadic evidence for grounding with abstract deictic gestures,' Janet Bavelas, Jennifer Gerwing, Meredith Allison, and Chantelle Sutton focus on the importance of the dyad and show that speakers are able to co-construct understanding with the use of abstract deictic gestures to represent the topic of conversation. The fifth chapter, 'If you don't already know, I'm certainly not going to show you!: Motivation to communicate affects gesture production,' by Autumn B. Hostetter, Martha W. Alibali, and Sheree M. Schrager shows that the gestures produced by speakers can be influenced by the motivation they have to communicate information; in their study, people who thought they were communicating rules to a competitor in a game would give less gestural information than those who thought they were communicating rules to a team member. In Chapter Six, 'Measuring the formal diversity of hand gestures by their hamming distance,' Katharina Hogrefe, Wolfram Ziegler, and Georg Goldenberg look at the formal diversity of gestures without speech in non-Sign Language speakers. Using the Hamburg Notation System for Sign Languages, they find that gestures in the absence of speech exhibit greater formal diversity than co-speech gestures. In the final chapter of this section, '''Parallel gesturing'' in adult-child conversations,' Maria Graziano, Adam Kendon, and Carla Cristilli look at adult-child dyads and find that children can, like adult, pay attention to gestures as well as words, but like any other component of language acquisition, the paralleling of gestures by children matures over time. The focus on interaction with children in this final chapter provides a nice bridge to the second part of the book.

Part Two, 'First language development and gesture,' is a collection of studies exploring what we can learn about language acquisition from looking at children's gestural mode. In Chapter Eight, Claire D. Vallotton's analysis of preverbal infants shows that even without speech children can engage in conceptually focused communication consisting of multiple turns. Chapter Nine, 'Giving a nod to social cognition: Developmental constraints on the emergence of conventional gestures and infant signs,' uses the same data as Chapter Eight but moves from looking at the communicative function of gestures to focusing on the emergence of these gestures and signs in infants. Maria Fusaro and Claire D. Vallotton find that caregiver frequency of use and motoric complexity play a role, but not all gesture emergence can be explained by these two factors alone, such as the late emergence of head nodding and shaking. They argue that gestures have high social-cognitive complexity. The tenth chapter, 'Sensitivity of maternal gesture to interlocutor and context,' by Maria Zammit and Graham Schafer, looks at the use of gesture by mothers while communicating with their infants and with adults and then compares these uses. The authors find that mothers modify their gestures for their infants by using fewer gestures, most of them deictic rather than emphatic, which appears to scaffold word learning. In Chapter Eleven, 'The organization of children's pointing stroke endpoints,' Mats Andrén looks at the timing of children's use of co-speech deictic gestures. Andrén finds that while around two thirds of infant deictics show the same timing with speech as adult gestures, the other third is sustained for longer than the speech to which adults give more sustained responses. In Chapter Twelve, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Susan Goldin-Meadow ask the question 'Is there an iconic gesture spurt at 26 months?' They found a sharp increase in the number of spontaneous iconic gestures in children at this age, and like Zammit and Schafer in Chapter Ten, they found an increase in the number of child-directed gestures over time. Kazuki Sekine in Chapter Thirteen 'The development of spatial perspective in the description of large-scale environments' looks at the gestural information produced by young Japanese school children describing their route home and on how this can give us insight into their cognitive model of the environment. Chapter Fourteen, 'Learning to use gesture in narratives: Developmental trends in formal and semantic gesture competence,' by Olga Capirci, Carla Cristilli, V. De Angelis, and Maria Graziano looks at the development of gestures in narratives of Italian children, both in terms of the semantic and formal development of the gestures. The final chapter in this section, Chapter 15, 'The changing role of gesture form and function in a picture book interaction between a child with autism and his support teacher' is a qualitative study by Hannah Sowden, Mick Perkins, and Judy Clegg, in which they look in depth at a single interaction between an autistic boy and a care-giver. They argue that autistic children may have more complicated understanding of gestural interaction than is currently thought to be the case.

The third part of the book 'Second language effects on gesture' is much shorter than the first two parts of the books, comprising of only two chapters. Chapter Sixteen follows on nicely from the last section, looking at Japanese, French and bilingual Japanese-French students. Meghan Zvaigzne, Yuriko Oshima-Takane, Fred Genesee, and Makiko Hirakawa found that Japanese speaking children, and bilinguals speaking Japanese produced more gestures in concurrence with memetics, while French children and bilinguals speaking French - which doesn't have memetics - gesture less. The other paper in this section, 'Gesture and language shift on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border' (Chapter Seventeen), by Kendra Newbury, is an exploration into gestural shift occurring in Uruguay as speakers move from the local variety of Portuguese to the more prestigious Spanish. She found that culturally specific emblematic gestures is a parallel phenomenon.

In Part Four the focus is on 'Gesture in the classroom and in problem-solving.' In Chapter Eighteen, 'Seeing the graph vs. being the graph: Gesture, engagement and awareness in school mathematics,' Susan Gerofsky investigates the gestures made by high-school students studying mathematics and finds that gestural evidence gives a good indicator of whether the student has understood the concepts being addressed. In Chapter 19, Mitchell J. Nathan and Martha W. Alibali investigate 'How gesture use enables intersubjectivity in the classroom.' They find that gestures can help teachers establish intersubjectivity by creating a shared referent. In Chapter Twenty, 'Microgenesis of gestures during mental rotation tasks recapitulates ontogenesis,' Mingyuan Chu and Sotaro Kita look at how adults solved spatial rotation problems and the gestures they used in that process. They report that gestures show that adults and children use similar strategies, including symbolic distancing and internalisation, but the process is much quicker for adults.

Part Five, 'Gesture aspects of discourse and interaction,' is a collection of four papers focusing on the role of gesture in natural discourse. In the first chapter in this section (Chapter Twenty-One) Stephani Foraker looks at 'Gesture and discourse: How we use our hands to introduce versus refer back.' Foraker finds that for English-speaking story tellers, the types of gestures produced didn't change between references to new and established subjects, but they also find that gestures for new referents are more likely to be redundant than those for established referents. Chapter Twenty-Two, 'Speakers' use of 'action' and 'entity' gestures with definite and indefinite references,' focuses exclusively on established referents. Katie Wilkin and Judith Holler look at how established referents' accompanying gestures vary depending on the definiteness of the referent. They find that both definite and indefinite referents are accompanied by gestures, but definite gestures are more likely to be accompanied by action-focused gesture, and indirect referents with entity-focused gestures. In Chapter Twenty-Three, '''Voices'' and bodies: Investigating nonverbal parameters of the participation framework,' Claire Maury-Rouan illustrates that in a collection of French narratives reported speech is generally accompanied by changes in gaze. Chapter Twenty-Four concludes this part of the book, with Lorenza Mondada and Florence Oloff utilising Conversation Analysis in 'Gestures in overlap: The situated establishment of speakership.' They find that by analysing gesture as well as speech we can observe when conversation participants are maintaining or withdrawing their turn.

The concluding section of this book is another short one; in Part Six, 'Gestural analysis of music and dance' there are two papers, one looking at a gestures of a choir conductor and the other at an interactive art installation. In Chapter Twenty-Five, 'Music and leadership: The choir conductor's multimodal communication,' Isabella Poggi focuses on a choir conductor as the leader of a cooperative group. She argues that a conductor's movements are a manifestation of their leadership and proposes an annotation scheme for analyzing conductor movements to allow for comparison of different conductors. The final chapter of the book (Chapter Twenty-Six) is 'Handjabber: Exploring metaphoric gesture and non-verbal communication via an interactive art installation' by Ellen Campana, Jessica Mumford, Cristóbal Martínez, Stjepan Rajko, Todd Ingalls, Lisa Tolentino, and Harvey Thornburg. 'Handjabber' is a collaborative interactive art installation that takes the gestures and physical orientation of two participants. Using movement tracking technology, data from their interaction are fed back to the participants in real time, as both music and manipulation of the audio recordings of the conversation.

EVALUATION

This collection of papers is a wonderful celebration of the heterogeneous nature of research currently being undertaken on gesture. As the subtitle suggests, Stam and Ishino wanted to showcase the interdisciplinary contribution that the study of gesture has made and is currently making. Not only does the volume address the areas discussed in each part of the book, but it touches on other areas where the study of gesture has offered an important theoretical perspective, including non-human primate research (Chapter Two) and the study of gesture in non-typical populations, such as persons with autism spectrum disorders (Chapter Fifteen). Of course, with such a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological practices, it would be surprising if this book had a coherent feel; if anything, the underlying common message of the book is that there are so many ways the study of gesture can be employed to help answer questions in so many fields, such as providing a more complete understanding of how conversational interactions occur or uncovering a greater extent of a child's linguistic competency.

The variety of work in this volume is evident just from the different methodologies and gesture categorisation schemas employed. While the framework of analysing co-speech gesture refined by McNeill (1992, 2005) has been a commonly used methodology, and is used in at least nine of the papers here (for example Chapters Three, Four, Eleven, Twenty-One and Twenty-Two), there is a whole range of other frameworks employed in this book. Some are drawn from Sign Language studies, including the Hamburg Notational System (Chapter Six), Infant Sign (Chapter Nine) and more general Sign Language categorisation (Chapter Fourteen). Others utilise Kendon's (2004) way of representing co-speech gesture (Chapter Seven), and even qualitative discussion of individual gestures (Chapter Fifteen). Interestingly, Chapters Three and Six both look at the use of gestures in narratives without speech, but they use different methodologies to explore similar questions: McNeill and Sowa (Chapter Three) use McNeill's schema to analyse how pantomime narrative gestures differ from their co-speech counterparts, while Hogrefe, Ziegler, and Goldenberg use the Hamburg Notation System to also explore how these gestures differ from co-speech gestures.

For people with different research interests there will obviously be different papers that draw them to this volume, but hopefully they can take the opportunity to read outside of their usual methodology and research area, because, as this book shows, there is great potential for cross-pollination, including the study of Sign Language, Conversation Analysis, child language acquisition, and cognitive linguistics. The volume is a great introduction for people with a small working knowledge of linguistic studies of gesture who want an idea of the current state of the art. I read this volume after a couple of years absence from the field of gesture research and I found it a useful, refreshing, and inspiring reintroduction to the field. It's also great to see a mix of established names and newer researchers, often working together.

Some minor problems: The first part of the book 'Nature and function of gestures,' felt the least convincing as a category of work. Obviously, trying to understand the nature of gestures and how they are used is a vital and central topic in gesture studies, but there is no reason why some of these papers could not have been placed in other sections, especially Chapter Seven (Grasiano, Kendon and Cristilli), which looks at parallels between children's and adults' gestures. While it made for a nice segue into Part Two of the book, it could have just as easily been included in that part, which is entirely focused on child gesture. Some articles in the volume also appeared to lack sufficient discussion, for example, in Chapter Two, looking at meaning in orangutang gestures, Cartmill and Bryne assign meanings to the twenty-nine consistent gestures they observed, but don't show us what these gestures look like. There also appears to be a small font issue with a phonetic rendering of a word in Chapter Seventeen on page 234. Another issue is the lack of accompanying visual media. While diagrams, drawings and still captures from videos work well enough to convey general ideas, there is no technological impediment to integrating video examples of the phenomena under consideration. Although many researchers are still navigating the complexities of ethics surrounding video data the inclusion of a DVD or website would allow for a more interesting presentation of some of the data under consideration.

Aside from these minor concerns, this book is a great compilation that will likely raise as many questions as it answers. For experienced scholars, it is a great opportunity to broaden one's horizon, and for newcomers it is a great starting place to sample a range of outstanding work.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Lauren Gawne is a PhD candidate in The School of Languages and
Linguistics at The University of Melbourne. Her current PhD research
focuses on language documentation, Tibeto-Burman languages and
social cognition. Other research interests include the study of gesture,
computer-mediated communication and Internet Englishes such as
LOLspeak.